Category: Marketing

I regularly have PR and marketing people getting grumpy with me because I said something not-nice about their client. This post is so I can put my thoughts on this situation, and my response to it, in one place that I can point people at, instead of explaining the same… Read More

Penelope* (not her real name) is an Instagram influencer. Companies sometimes pay her, in cash or in kind, to promote their products, hoping she will somehow influence those who follow her online into buying their products. How do companies decide Penelope is worth courting? Her follower count. There’s just one problem: it’s… Read More

Welcome to the latest in what has become a tradition of disclosure posts after major events where vendors attempt to sway my opinion with gifts of dubious usefulness. This one covers VMworld US 2015, and I’m also including vExpert type schwag that is organised to be delivered around the time… Read More

This is part of a series of posts sponsored by VMware. Check out part 2 and part 3. Read my disclosure statement here. What is it like to install vROps from scratch for the first time? Until this post series, I’d never done it, and while you can have a… Read More

You will now be able to read my meagre scribblings at Forbes.com! I’ve signed up as a Contributor, joining such illustrious minds as Ben Kepes, Paul Miller, and Theo Priestley. Basically, it’s a blog at Forbes.com, only I get paid for writing there instead of writing mostly for free here. I’m on… Read More

Inspired by a question from @jfrappier, here is a bunch of vendor swag I’ve received over the years that has actually proved useful. Hopefully this will help marketing at the various vendors to invest in useful swag and not pointless landfill. The biggest issue with swag is its marginal utility:… Read More

I have developed something of a reputation for snarking at keynotes. It is a reputation that I fully deserve, and I have no intention of changing. What I do want to change is how vendor marketing and PR people interpret my snark. I want them to understand why I snark,… Read More

What I like most about the FlashArray//m is the combination of very dull things that combine to make this an interesting piece of infrastructure. I tweeted out a cheeky picture of a 6509 with a Pure Storage logo on it, because that’s what the FlashArray//m reminds me of: a modular… Read More

My biggest challenge with what Cloudera presented was that they tried to cram in too much into a single presentation. It was a grab bag of features, rather than a real explanation of why anyone should care. Part of this is because Apache Hadoop, on which Cloudera is based, is… Read More

We’ve all seen the AWS numbers now, and hopefully looked at them in a bit more detail than just the headlines. I’ve written about cloud economics before, so let’s revisit things a little. The AWS business is apparently a roughly $6bn-a-year revenue business. That’s all external revenue from customers, not… Read More